The American Film Institute today received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to embark upon an unprecedented, landmark study of gender parity in the history of American film. Named for director Lloyd Bacon’s lost 1928 film, “Women They Talk About,” the initiative seeks to explore how gender parity was nearly achieved in the early decades of film — an era in which more women held positions of power than at any other time in the U.S. motion picture industry. The project will be led by the research team at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films,…